


EXECUTE

by DiscordantWords



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Community: holmestice, Don't copy to another site, Grieving John Watson, Inspired by Stephen King, It's a happy ending but a bit of an uneasy one, M/M, Morally Ambiguous Character, Post-Reichenbach, Stephen King References, Supernatural Elements, Unresolved Romantic Tension, word processor of the gods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27806638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscordantWords/pseuds/DiscordantWords
Summary: "He was working on it," Mrs Hudson says, gesturing to the odd collection of misaligned parts. "He meant to give it to you."John is not so sure about that.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 90
Kudos: 182
Collections: Holmestice Exchange - Winter 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thetimemoves (WriteOut)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WriteOut/gifts).



> This is a fusion with/homage to the Stephen King short story "Word Processor of the Gods." I got it in my head that I wanted to do something King-related, but "The Doctor's Case" seemed like too obvious a choice. I hope you enjoy, and Happy Holmestice!

____

The day of the funeral, John asks to see the body. 

It's not that he doesn't trust Mycroft. It just that, frankly, he doesn't trust Mycroft. 

He is not met with any resistance. He is escorted to a quiet room and left alone with the coffin. It takes him several moments to work up the nerve to lift the lid. 

He lets the air gust out through his teeth when he finally does it. Sherlock is there, as he should be, still and dead, all waxen skin and carefully arranged hair that hides the ruin of a shattered skull. His hands are folded over his chest. When John touches his skin, it is cold. 

John closes the lid, steps back. Thinks about the last time he touched Sherlock's skin. His wrist had still been warm, then, but devoid of life all the same. 

The room is very quiet. His own breath seems far too loud. He wants to speak, but he cannot think of a single thing to say.

Until that moment he hadn't realised he'd been hoping for a miracle.

____

Three days later he stands in front of Sherlock's shiny black headstone and begs him for that miracle.

He doesn't get an answer. This does not surprise him. Why should it? Heroes don't exist. Miracles don't exist either. 

Neither does Sherlock. Not anymore.

____

Mrs Hudson comes by.

John is surprised to see her. She'd objected strongly to his departure from Baker Street. He thinks she'll object again once she sees where he's landed. It's not quite a bedsit, but it's bland and impersonal and utterly lifeless. 

She looks around, but holds her tongue. She is carrying a cardboard box. He takes it from her. He ought to feel curious, he knows. But he feels nothing. 

"I was cleaning out his things," she says, when he's finally mustered up the energy to make her a cup of tea.

He wants to hear a rebuke in her voice. He'd deserve one, he thinks. He'd packed up his own things and moved out of a flat that was too cluttered with Sherlock, and left her to clean up the mess. 

She says nothing more, only gives him a meaningful look. He leans forward and takes the lid off of the box.

Inside is a laptop. 

He blinks, shakes his head. His first attempt at speech does not work out very well so he takes a sip of tea, tries again. "Mrs Hudson, I'm sorry, but that's not mine."

_It's not Sherlock's, either,_ he means to say, because he's seen Sherlock's laptop and this—this strange hodgepodge of misaligned parts—certainly is not it. 

"He was working on it," she says. "He meant to give it to you." 

John looks back down at the laptop again, uncomprehending. "He meant to give this to me." 

_You're mistaken,_ he thinks, and the small flare of anger surprises him. He wants to shout at her, wants to demand an explanation for why she's here now, two months after Sherlock's death, stirring up old hurts and, for what? To hand off a piece of rubbish in a cardboard box? 

"He felt badly about that little accident with the sulfuric acid," she says, and she says _little accident_ as if she hadn't spent an entire afternoon shouting at the both of them over the damage to the kitchen table. 

And John remembers the _little accident_ very well, and he remembers that once Mrs Hudson had tired at shouting at them over the table he'd taken up the mantle and spent a bit of time shouting at Sherlock over what had happened to his laptop. Somewhere amidst all of that shouting had been a demand to replace it. 

Sherlock hadn't replaced it, of course. John had eventually bought a new one, and that had been that. 

"Right," John says, because he feels he must say something. The device in the box looks like it has been Frankensteined together out of countless ill-fitting parts. There are wires jutting out of the back. It looks nothing like a functional laptop. It looks like a bomb. "Er. Great. Thank you." 

"I don't think he was quite done," she says. 

"No," he agrees. He puts the lid back on the box. The thing inside is uncomfortable to look at. "Seems like he wasn't." 

"He'd have wanted you to have it, though," she says. "I'm sure of that." 

He wants to ask her why, or how she can possibly be sure of such a thing. No one could ever be sure of anything with Sherlock. He was simply Sherlock, and John had thought him amazing (and also infuriating, but mostly amazing), and now he was dead. He had not left instructions behind. He'd not left a note. 

(this phone call)

Sherlock had not been mechanically inclined. He hadn't tinkered. If he'd had any intention whatsoever of replacing John's laptop, he'd have simply ordered a new one. Not—whatever this was. 

(it's my note)

"Thank you," John says, when Mrs Hudson has finished her tea. His anger has mostly faded, chased away by the same blunt, numb bewilderment that had settled over him that day on the pavement. 

"It's very quiet without you, dear," she tells him. 

He offers her a sympathetic smile. They both know he had not been the noisy one. 

"They say such terrible things about him," she says. "In the papers." 

He has seen the headlines. She is not wrong. 

After an interminable period of chitchat, she goes. She leaves the box behind. He cannot quite bring himself to look at it again and so he takes himself down to Tesco. Buys a newspaper. 

Kitty Riley has been busy. It should anger him, the things she's written. The lies she's peddled. Others have joined in. They have worried and picked at the frayed threads of Sherlock's reputation, have pulled and tugged and unraveled him bit by bit. 

He had not died a hero's death. Scotland Yard has distanced themselves from him completely. He is a joke, a fraud, a liar. He died in shame, unable to face up to his crimes. That is what they say. 

John knows better. And he should be angry. But he is not. He is tired, and he thinks he might be sad, he thinks he might always be sad, but he mostly feels nothing at all. And that is all right. He is able to wake up in the morning, he is able to manage a reasonable facsimile of normal human behaviour. There is not much more he could ask for. 

Well. There _is,_ but. Those hopes had been dashed when he'd lifted the lid on Sherlock's coffin. 

He throws the newspaper away when he is done with it. He wishes he had not purchased it at all. There is nothing he can do about Sherlock's reputation. Lestrade will not take his calls. He supposes he should consider himself lucky that he's not in prison. 

The box remains where he left it. 

John can ignore it no longer. He pours himself a drink—a double—and goes into the sitting room to regard it.

Mrs Hudson, well-intentioned as she was, had simply assigned meaning to something that had none. There was no reason Sherlock would have built him a laptop.

John lifts the lid off of the box, looks at the clunky, odd thing inside. He lifts it up. It is heavier than it looks. The nest of wires at the back are soldered together in unusual permutations. 

_Bomb,_ he decides, though the thought is not accompanied by any particular sense of alarm. It is not ticking, which he supposes should be a relief. 

He ought to call someone. Instead he lifts the lid—slowly—and braces himself for the explosion. 

It does not come. 

There is a screen (dark) and a keyboard (mostly ordinary) and a little round button that certainly appears to be the power switch. 

The letters on the keyboard are all where they are supposed to be. The only thing unusual is the ENTER key. Or, rather, what _should_ be the ENTER key. There is a bright red key nestled in its place on the keyboard. This key reads EXECUTE. 

It makes him uneasy. But that does not stop him from pressing the power button with the tip of his index finger. 

The laptop makes a sound, a sort of grinding whir that has him flinching instinctively. But the screen flickers to life.

> HELLO JOHN

John blinks at the words on the screen for far longer than he should. 

Well, then. Mrs Hudson had not been entirely mistaken after all. Whatever Sherlock had been doing, whatever he'd been _trying_ to do, he'd intended it to be for John. 

There had been no load screen, and the operating system is not anything that John recognises. The laptop had merely opened into what looked like a very simple word processing program. The cursor blinks rhythmically next to the words that Sherlock had left for him. 

All at once he feels like crying. Pressure gathers behind his eyes.

He thinks of Sherlock in his coffin, too pale and too still, almost unrecognisable in his stillness. Sherlock, sprawled on the ground outside of Barts Hospital, the place where they'd first met. Sherlock's blood on the ground. 

It is not fair. It's a childish thought, but one that he has been unable to shake since that day. It is not fair, what happened to Sherlock. He had loved his work above all else, and Moriarty had taken that from him. 

He was brilliant, he was incredible, and he died in disgrace and despair. He had meant everything to John, but John could not save him. And now even his legacy is tarnished. 

If asked, John would say he tried. But he did not try. Not really. He knows that. It is something he has to live with, if he is indeed going to live. Sherlock had needed him, and John had called him a machine. Sherlock had been a desperate voice on the other end of the line, and John could not talk him down. 

He looks at the screen, at the blinking cursor, at the words Sherlock had left him in greeting.

He brushes the EXECUTE button with his index finger, hesitates. It really is quite an alarming shade of red. Something about it seems . . . dangerous, almost. 

He presses it. 

The cursor drops to the next line. Nothing explodes. 

John laughs out loud. It is just a laptop. A weird, barely functional laptop with nothing of use installed—he's not even sure if it has _wi-fi_ —but there is nothing dangerous about it. Well, nothing more dangerous than some dodgy wiring. 

He does not know what to make of it. Sherlock had been funny like that. He often did things that made sense only to himself. 

(I'm a fake)

John looks at the blinking cursor. He looks at it for a long time. Then he types.

> SHERLOCK HOLMES WAS NOT A FRAUD.

He stares at the words. It feels good, seeing them written out like that. It reminds him that he has not written a word on his blog since—since what happened. He should. He should set the record straight. There were, perhaps, people out there who had taken his silence as an admission of guilt. 

He'll dig out his laptop tomorrow. His real laptop, not—whatever this one is. 

He hits the EXECUTE key with a bit more force than necessary, intending to punctuate his decision. 

The machine begins to whir, internals fans kicking up. The screen flickers. 

"Christ," John says. He lifts his hands away, wondering if the damn thing might be about to blow up after all. It is putting off heat. There is a faint smell of burning plastic. 

The words on the screen disappear. 

John laughs, again, because isn't that just perfect? Christ, what had Sherlock been thinking? He may have been a genius, but he'd certainly not been an engineer. 

He presses the power button and the machine mercifully powers down before it can ignite or melt or go supernova.

He finishes his drink. He goes to sleep.

____

In the morning, the news is impossible to avoid.

Sherlock's face (in the hat, always with the hat, he'd have _hated it_ ) is on the front of all the papers. His name flashes on a scrolling red banner on the telly, interrupting the morning weather report. People in line at Tesco murmur about it amongst themselves. 

"Shame, innit? He was right all along." 

"Poor bastard." 

John ignores them as he has ignored everything else. He pays for his shopping, he goes to work, he makes the requisite small talk with his patients. But beneath it all there is a drumbeat in his chest, a crushing, thundering roar that threatens to rip him apart. 

It is not elation, and it is not sorrow. He does not have a word for what it is. He wants to scream. He wants to laugh. 

He'd had no idea that the investigation was ongoing. That anyone out there cared about the truth behind Moriarty and Richard Brook. Sherlock had been tried and executed in the court of public opinion, after all. But it seems that they—whether Lestrade or someone else, someone impartial—had kept looking, kept digging. 

And Sherlock's name has been cleared. He has been vindicated, though far too late to save his life. 

When he has finished his shift, John takes a taxi to Barts Hospital. He stands on the pavement looking up at the empty roof. He chases the ghost of the sensation, the swooping, shocking horror of it all as Sherlock stepped forward and rushed to meet the ground. 

(I'm a fake)

Sherlock had died believing himself ruined. He had died believing his work was the grand sum of his worth, and that it was lost to him. 

And John had been dazzled by him, had been absolutely head over heels in love with him, would have followed him anywhere, but he'd been unable to get those words out when it counted. It might have made a difference. It might not have. John will never know. 

(you machine)

He spends nearly forty minutes lost in thought, looking up. He does not cry—at least, he thinks he doesn't—but the wind bites bitterly at his cheeks and when he swipes at them his hand comes away damp. 

Things could have been different, he thinks. Things _should_ have been different.

____

It is easier, now, to think about his blog. The world no longer believes Sherlock to be a fraud. John can memorialise him properly.

He spends time choosing his words. He is careful about it. He uses his own laptop, of course, not the strange half-finished monstrosity that Sherlock left for him.

He ought to throw it out, he thinks. It's not functional. It's not even particularly sentimental.

He doesn't. But he doesn't switch it on again, either.


	2. Chapter 2

____

"What is this?" Mary asks him. 

John is stooped over a cardboard box in the sitting room of their new townhouse, and he has to straighten up to see what she is looking at. When he sees, something in his chest tightens, an invisible fist squeezing at his heart. 

Sherlock's laptop. He has not thought about it in more than a year, and yet there it is, held aloft in Mary's casual grip. 

"It's—" he says, and stops. His mouth is dry.

She touches a finger to the odd nest of wires jutting out of the back. Her voice is amused, not particularly concerned. "Looks a bit like a bomb." 

"Just a—thing—Sherlock was working on before he—" he clears his throat. "Died." 

"What kind of thing?" she asks, still looking it over with a dubious eye. 

"Don't really know," he says, and he is impressed with how casual he sounds. Almost as if his heart is not battering against his ribs like a frantic animal. "Laptop, I guess. But he never got the chance to explain it." 

She nods, sets it down. Looks at him. "Does it work?" 

"No," he says. "I'll get rid of it." 

He picks it up and is surprised anew at the weight of it. He wonders, not for the first time, just what the hell Sherlock had been thinking. 

He takes it into the bedroom, sets it on a high shelf in the back of the closet. It is not quite _getting rid of it,_ but it will have to do.

____

It takes him less than twenty-four hours to remove it from the closet. Mary has gone out with a friend from work and he is alone in a space that, while bright and airy and friendly, is still a bit like alien territory. The townhouse smells of fresh paint. Its creaks and groans are unfamiliar. It does not yet feel like home. 

Still, he thinks, it could be worse. Mary is lovely. They get on well. He couldn't exactly invite her to live in the cramped little space he'd retreated to after Baker Street, and so getting a place together made sense. They have a future. He supposes he'll get around to proposing, eventually. 

The laptop is heavy in his hands, faintly warm. That should alarm him, he thinks, the warmth. 

He lifts the lid, studies the dark screen, the weird keyboard with its bright red EXECUTE button where the enter key should be. 

It bothers him that he'll never know what Sherlock had intended. He wonders if Sherlock even knew, or if it was just one of his strange tangents, something to fill the time, something to ease the boredom between cases. 

He brushes a finger over the power button. There is no way that there is still life in the battery, not after so much time has passed. He doesn't even see a place on the back where a battery could possibly be detached, or a power cable plugged in. 

He presses the button, regardless. 

The machine hums and whirs, and the screen lights up. He smiles faintly. Sherlock always had managed to impress him in the strangest of ways. 

John's smile fades as the words appear on the screen:

> HELLO JOHN

It stuns him, from time to time, just how much he misses Sherlock. The shock of his death has faded. John has a life, he has a relationship, and he is settled. And yet, every once in a while, something comes along and cuts his legs right out from under him. It takes his breath away. 

There is an unpleasant warmth rising from the keyboard. 

"Hi Sherlock," John says, and his voice only cracks a little bit on Sherlock's name. 

He looks at the blinking cursor. Types.

> MY NAME IS JOHN WATSON

He smiles as the letters appear. It is absurd, really, this desire to see Sherlock's odd half-finished invention working (at least partially) in the way he'd intended. 

He is rusty, he thinks. He'd written a flurry of blog posts shortly after Sherlock's name had been cleared, but then, in the absence of anything new or interesting to write about, he'd just . . . stopped.

But he does have new and interesting things to write about. Doesn't he? His life did not end when Sherlock's did. Even if it sometimes felt that way, at first. 

He presses the EXECUTE key, starts a new line.

> MY GIRLFRIEND'S NAME IS MARY MORSTAN. WE LIVE TOGETHER.

(boring) 

He shakes his head, fondly. Mary is good for him. He likes her. She's got a sharp enough wit that he's pretty sure Sherlock would have liked her too. 

The heat rising off of the keyboard is too much to ignore. There is a faint, growing smell of melting plastic. 

He presses the DELETE key, watches Mary's name disappear. 

The screen flickers, and the laptop hums. The foul odour intensifies. Surely something is short-circuiting somewhere in the machine's guts. He presses the power button, and is relieved when the machine powers down. 

It _is_ a little bit dangerous, he thinks. He shouldn't touch it again. It's likely to start a fire. 

The flat feels cold. He stands, goes into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. 

Mary's kettle is gone. 

He stands blinking at the counter where it should be for far too long. He opens the cabinets. Inside is a hodgepodge assortment of plates and dishes, the sort of things cobbled together after years of living alone. The cute, patterned dish sets that Mary had brought to the flat—that he'd watched her carefully unpack just yesterday—are not there. 

And her kettle is gone. 

Uneasy, he leaves the kitchen, goes back into the sitting room. It is as he remembers it, mostly. There is still the red patterned wallpaper that made him think, fondly, of 221B. And against the papered wall is the plain, functional grey sofa he'd picked out. But Mary's throw blanket is missing. And the curtains. And the little stack of books she'd left by the door. 

The only belongings in the room are his own. 

He goes into their bedroom, flings open the wardrobe. His own shirts hang, neatly pressed. The drawers yield his items: pants, socks, vests and pyjamas. Mary's dressing gown is missing from the back of the bedroom door, his toothbrush stands alone at the sink in the bathroom. 

_She's left me,_ he thinks, stunned and numb and furious all at once.

(wrong)

Why would she wait until they'd moved in together to do such a thing? They'd barely cohabitated for two full days. Surely it wasn't _that_ terrible, living with him. 

There is something tugging at his subconscious, something too large and terrifying to comprehend. He ignores it, because if he lets his thoughts stray in that direction, he does not know if he'll be able to pull them back.

Inexplicably, unthinkably, improbably—at some point during the day, while John was preoccupied with the dysfunctional bit of scrap metal his dead flatmate had left behind, Mary Morstan had packed up her half of their home and walked out without a word. 

He picks up his phone, scrolls through his contacts. She has deleted her number.

____

"Mary," he says, and in spite of his best efforts something of the bewildered desperation that had kept him up half the night drinking must emerge in his voice. 

She looks up at him, a polite smile frozen on her face, and he swears it is like looking into the face of a stranger. 

"What happened?" he asks her. 

"Sorry, Dr Watson?" she says. Whatever she see is in his face causes her to take a step back. She holds the chart in her hand out in front of her, almost like a shield. "Next patient's ready for you." 

"That's—you're just going to pretend that nothing happened?" he asks. His face is heating. A bead of cold sweat trickles down his back, between his shoulder blades. "I thought we were good. I thought it—I thought we—how could you just—" 

They are attracting an audience, he knows. He also knows he should be embarrassed by this. But Mary is blinking at him with something that looks like genuine confusion, confusion edging on fear, and he cannot bring himself to care what anyone else might be thinking. 

"John, a word?" Sarah Sawyer touches him on the arm.

He looks to her, hoping for an ally, because she'd been supportive of the whole bloody thing right from the start, but her face is concerned and closed off and unhappy. 

He offers one more helpless glance at Mary, then turns and follows Sarah into her office.

"What are you doing?" Sarah asks. She has never been one to mince words. He'd liked that about her when they'd first met. They'd tried dating once, but it had fizzled out quickly. Sherlock's fault, he supposes. Lots of things had been Sherlock's fault. 

"Mary's left me," he says, because he can think of no other way to say it. 

"What are you talking about?"

"I don't know. I don't know what happened. We moved in, and everything was great, and then she just—she just disappeared. Even took her number out of my bloody phone. No explanation." 

"John," Sarah says, and she is shaking her head slowly. "What are you _talking_ about?" 

"Mary," John says. "Mary Morstan." 

"Mary Morstan broke up with you." 

"Yes!" he says, because he cannot understand why that is so difficult to grasp. 

"John," Sarah says. "You two aren't—you were never dating." 

"What are _you_ talking about? Of course we are. Were. Whatever. She asked me out for drinks that time after the patient with the severed thumb. You were there." 

"I was," Sarah says. She looks like she needs a stiff drink. She looks ill. "I was. I was there, John. And you turned her down." 

"I— _what_?"

"You turned her down. You told her you were flattered, but not really looking for anything. That you were still—grieving. That you were, for all intents and purposes, married to your work." 

His stomach drops. He sits for a moment, quiet and still in the little hard-backed chair in front of Sarah's desk while the world rearranges around him. 

"You agreed to keep it professional," Sarah says, and she offers him a tentative smile. "I was a bit relieved, honestly. Workplace relationships are never really the best idea. I would know." 

He can remember his first date with Mary. He can remember the way she'd smiled at him when she'd asked him out, the pair of them flushed with adrenaline and laughing over what they'd just experienced. He'd almost refused, Sherlock had still been heavy on his mind, but he'd made himself go. He'd had a lovely time. It had been the start of something good. 

(when you eliminate the impossible)

No. No it couldn't be. 

(whatever remains)

They had been just words on a screen. Nonsense. Simplistic statements, simply meant to test whether Sherlock's strange little machine still worked. 

(however improbable)

> MY GIRLFRIEND'S NAME IS MARY MORSTAN. WE LIVE TOGETHER.

He'd typed it out, and then he'd hit DELETE. 

(must be the truth)

He stands up from the chair. His movement must be too sudden, because Sarah flinches back a little bit. 

"Sorry," he says. 

"John," she says delicately. "Are you—?" 

"I'm not feeling well," he says. "I think I'm coming down with something. I need to—I'm just going to go home. We'll talk tomorrow, yeah?" 

He flees without waiting for a response.


	3. Chapter 3

____

His flat is still cold and half-empty, devoid of the warmth that Mary had brought to it. He does not even remove his coat, goes straight to the laptop and turns it on. 

The processor hums. The smell of melting plastic rises in the air, sharper this time.

> HELLO JOHN

He hits the EXECUTE key to drop to the next line. Spends a moment staring at the cursor as it blinks blinks blinks. Then he types: 

> THERE IS A BOTTLE OF SCOTCH ON MY DESK

He hits EXECUTE before he can think too much about it. The fan kicks up, whining in distress. Smoke curls up from the keyboard. 

He looks to his left. There is a bottle of scotch, unopened, liquid gleaming unassumingly in the weak light from the monitor. 

"Jesus," John says, and leans forward. It is difficult to breathe. 

He picks up the bottle, turns it over in his hand. It feels real. It is real. 

He opens it, takes a sniff. Then a sip, straight from the bottle. The liquor burns the back of his throat. 

"Jesus," he says again. He puts the bottle down, looks at the screen. "Sherlock, what the hell were you trying to do?" 

(just a magic trick)

It does not make any sense. Sherlock was a genius, sure, but even he could not perform miracles. He couldn't even bring himself back from the dead. 

John takes another sip from the bottle. 

"Shit," he says. 

If Mary were in the room, she'd turn to him and say something like _very articulate, John_ with a sly little smile. But Mary is not in the room. Mary is gone, because John deleted their relationship, and now she is a stranger. 

He looks back at the screen. 

"Don't," he tells himself, even as he types. It does not matter. It is just words on a screen. Nothing on earth could possibly have that kind of power.

> MARY MORSTAN

He takes another sip from the bottle, and then presses delete without allowing himself to hesitate. As before, the screen flickers. The fan screams in protest. He has to jerk his hands away from the keys as the heat becomes too intense. 

He jabs his finger down on the power button before it can get worse. The fan cuts off. The screen goes dark. All that is left is a faint burnt odour. 

He sits, shaking, alone at his desk. He takes another drink. 

_What have you done?_ he asks himself. He does not have an answer. 

"Just an experiment," he says out loud to the empty room. "It's just an experiment. I just—I just need to know. I just need to know." 

His voice shakes. His hand shakes. He reaches for the bottle.

____

He goes to work in the morning with a fine cold sweat prickling along his spine. 

_Murderer,_ he thinks.

Sarah will know. She will suspect. He behaved strangely towards Mary, and now Mary is gone. Might be gone. What has he done? What has he _done?_

"Good morning John," Sarah says. She barely spares him a glance as he comes in. There is no lingering discomfort, no unwelcome concern. 

"Hi," he says, and hesitates. "Is—erm. Is Mary in yet? I wanted to apologise." 

Sarah lifts her head. "Mary?" 

"Yeah, I—" he stops, reads the truth on her face. "You know what? Never mind. Sorry." 

"All right," Sarah says, and looks back down at the paperwork on her desk. 

_Murderer,_ he thinks again, guilty, sick with it. Except that is not quite right. He has not murdered Mary Morstan.

He's deleted her. 

She does not exist. She has never existed. Mary, who used to smile at him when a patient did or said something particularly egregious. Mary, with her sharp humour and sly comments. Mary, who he'd wanted to build a life with. Deleted. Gone. 

He should feel the loss keenly. He should be crushed with it, he should be desperate, he should be frantic. He is not. He is, instead, rather frighteningly calm. 

He thinks back to the first time he powered on the laptop, the way he'd typed

> SHERLOCK HOLMES WAS NOT A FRAUD.

and pressed the EXECUTE button. He thinks about the crush of media coverage the very next day, as Scotland Yard announced the results of their investigation. Moriarty, implicated. Sherlock, vindicated. It had all seemed very neat, very tidy. Very unlikely.

It hadn't been Scotland Yard, he thinks. It had been him. He'd done it. He'd done it with that machine. 

And he thinks maybe he knows why Sherlock left it for him.

____

He goes home. His heart pounds against his ribs, a frantic pulse that seems to drum out Sherlock's name. He is cold. His palms are sweaty, and he wipes them against his trousers. 

He thinks about Sherlock as he was in those frantic days leading up to his death. The way he'd flailed and thrashed like some kind of wild creature caught in a trap. The way his aloof façade had cracked, how he'd lost his cool a bit. 

John's faith in him had never wavered. He'd been certain that Sherlock would figure it out. He'd been so sure, right up until the end. Sherlock Holmes worked miracles. 

(just a magic trick)

_He meant to give it to you,_ Mrs Hudson had said. 

John presses the power button. 

The smell of burning plastic is immediate, sharp, intense. The fans whir. Something deep inside makes a pained grinding sound. The screen flickers to life. 

He'd expected a miracle. He'd insisted on seeing Sherlock's body at the funeral. A part of him had been so certain, so sure that he would lift the lid and gaze down into unoccupied space. But Sherlock had been there. Dead. Dead and gone and far beyond the reach of any miracles. 

Except. Maybe not.

> HELLO JOHN

"Hi," John says. His voice breaks. "I'm sorry I took so long." 

His hand trembles as he reaches for the keyboard. He is careful. So very careful. But quick. He does not have much time. Instinctively, he knows this.

> SHERLOCK HOLMES FAKED HIS DEATH

He hits EXECUTE. The machine grinds and whirs. The keys are almost too hot to touch. 

> HE COMPLETED HIS MISSION AND RETURNED HOME

EXECUTE. 

The screen flickers. Smoke begins first to curl, then to pour out from the keyboard. The chemical burning smell sharpens. Sparks dance in the nest of wires jutting out of the back. 

"Please," John whispers. He is biting his lip so hard he can taste blood.

> WE SHARE A FLAT AT 221B BAKER STREET

EXECUTE. 

One of the sparks catches, flares into flame. The fan screams. 

There is not enough time for him to ask for everything he wants. To ask for Sherlock in his arms, in his bed. The screen flickers again. Something begins to beep, a frantic, repetitive sound. 

_Mary,_ John thinks with a flare of guilt, but it is too late, the screen is melting and smoking and he lurches back from the little desk with his hands held out in an attempt to shield his face. 

Silence. 

John drops his hands. 

He is in the sitting room at the Baker Street flat. It is as he remembers it, cluttered and comfortable. 

He breathes out in a rush, doubles over, puts his hands on his knees. The laptop, twisted and smoking and very, very dead, is on the little desk by the window. Blood roars in his ears. 

"John?" 

John jerks upright, turns. His heart slams against his ribs. 

Sherlock is there, by the door. He is dressed for receiving clients—dark suit, jewel-toned shirt, artfully mussed hair. His face is concerned. There is a small crease between his brows. 

"Sherlock," John manages to gasp out, and he thinks he may humiliate himself by dropping to his knees on the floor. He takes a shaky step, and then another, and then he is gripping the back of his chair, holding himself upright. He is trembling. 

"What are you doing with that?" Sherlock asks, his head tilted, peering over John's shoulder. 

John turns to follow his gaze. Looks at the laptop. He laughs a little, because he is not sure what else to do. "Just trying it out." 

"Did it work?" Sherlock's voice is curious. He brushes past John on his way towards the desk and John nearly wilts from it, the whiff of familiar scent and the ensuing rush of sense memory. 

"No," John says. He laughs again, the sound high, a little hysterical. "I guess not. It. Sort of. Well. Melted." 

"Ah," Sherlock says. "Mrs Hudson won't be pleased about the smell." He is already on the way to open the window. 

John smiles, because Sherlock has set fire to innumerable things in their kitchen, and he has never been overly concerned about Mrs Hudson's reaction. This is theater for John's benefit, and it is not particularly convincing. 

He wonders what Sherlock would do if he stepped forward and crumpled up that ridiculously expensive suit jacket in a trembling fist, if he hauled him forward and kissed him. 

"Sorry," Sherlock says, and John may be lying to himself, but he thinks Sherlock is referring to something more than the ruined machine. 

"It's—fine," he says. It is not fine, not really, but his throat has tightened and his voice is too thick to say much else. He wonders how long it has been for them, how long Sherlock has been back. He had not thought to specify. 

Sherlock turns back to the twisted, melted lump on the desk. He pokes at it, frowns. "Electronics. Really not my area," he says.

"No," John says. "I don't know what you were thinking." 

"I'll throw it out in the morning," Sherlock says. 

"Probably for the best," John agrees. 

Sherlock nods, fixes John with bright eyes. "Dinner?" 

John smiles, looks down at the ground. He thinks he might just get what he wants after all. "Starving."

**Author's Note:**

> I recently reread Stephen King's short story for the first time in many years, and I was struck by the difference between the words on the page and how I'd remembered it. It is, technically, a happy ending—the grieving, miserable protagonist is able to rewrite his life in such a way that he ends up married to the woman he'd always pined for, with the son he always wanted. But he does that at the expense of his existing family—he deletes the son he does not love, he casts his own deeply unhappy wife as the cause for all of his suffering and is relieved to be rid of her. It might be a happy ending, but it's also a deeply unsettling one. 
> 
> It was interesting to try to adapt this into the BBC Sherlock 'verse. John's grief provided a natural entry point, and I wondered how far he would take things once he finally realized the power he held in his hands. Turns out he took it pretty damn far. 
> 
> Mary does not really get a fair shake here, much like Lina, Richard Hagstrom's unhappy wife in the original story. I like to think that John would have brought her back, given the chance. But it's hard to say for sure. It does also give rise to the interesting question of whether or not you can delete someone like Mary, who never really existed at all. 
> 
> Anyway, that's a lot of words to say that I hope you enjoyed this!


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